Did Dave Grohl Retire The Foo Fighters At The Global Citizen Festival?

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Last night, the Foo Fighters played the last scheduled show on their tour at Central Park’s Great Lawn in New York City, as part of the Global Citizen Festival. During their 45 minute set, Dave Grohl dropped a bit of a bombshell to the audience: “Without making a big deal out of it, we don’t have any shows after this… honestly, I don’t know when we’re gonna do it again.” He didn’t speak too much though, noting that “I’d rather see Neil Young!” Young headlined the festival after the Foo Fighters’ set.

Besides the estimated 60,000 people at the Festival, the concert was broadcast on a number of television channels as well as online, and fans immediately took to the Foo Fighters’ official Facebook page, with comments like “I’m really hoping that I didn’t just witness the band’s last ever show,” “Did the Foos break up tonight or was it just me?” and “Foo Fighters please stay!!!!”

At the end of the band’s set, they hugged it out and posed for an onstage photo with beaming smiles… looking not at all like a band who’d just called it quits. All the members of the band later joined Neil Young & Crazy Horse (along with Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys, members of Band Of Horses and the rapper K’Naan, all of whom performed earlier in the day) for an encore of “Rockin’ In The Free World.”

In all likelihood, Grohl was expressing “road-burn” from the group’s massive tour for 2011’s Wasting LIght. Grohl’s pattern over the years is to follow up Foo Fighters albums and tours with other projects: some of those have included a stint as the drummer in Queens Of The Stone Age, his thrash metal project Probot and the super group Them Crooked Vultures with QOTA’s Josh Homme and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones. Grohl is currently working on Sound City, a documentary about the legendary L.A. studio where Nirvana recorded Nevermind.

At any rate, even if Grohl actually meant that he might not play with Foo Fighters again, he might take a look at the career of Neil Young, who’d left Crazy Horse behind a number of times in the past four decades, only to return to them again (as he did last night).